Phonograph Quotes

“You know, I do music. If you look under the hood of the industry I'm in, it's all based on technology. From radio to phonographs to CDs, it's all technology. Microphones, reel-to-reels, cameras, editing, chips, it's all technology.”

“That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”

“Temples and churches have become social centers. They have lost their original purpose because the minds of the people are more attracted to worldly things than to prayer. The lips repeat the prayer mechanically like a phonograph record, but the mind wanders to other places. (23-24)”

“The phonograph and kinetoscope may some day seize and perpetuate all save the magnetic touch, but that weird, illusive, indefinable yet wonderfully real power by which the orator subdues may never be caught by science or preserved for the cruel dissecting knife of the critic.”

“If I could record them and transmit them to the present age, they would constitute nothing more, nowadays, than dead sounds. They would be, in a word, sounds other than what they actually were, and from what their phonographic labels pretended they were – since it's in ourselves that the silence exists. It was while the sounds were still mysterious that it would have been really interesting to render the mystery palpable and transferable.”

“Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the shampoo and the soda pop and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it's all nice and pretty and LIKABLE. Everything is fun in the sun! Where's the discernment? Where's the arbitration that separates what I LIKE from what I RESPECT, what I deem WORTHY, what has... listen to me now... SIGNIFICANCE.”

“There are no coincidences", Silette wrote. "Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs. To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.”

“As we watch, in fascination, the arresting replicas of reality on our television screen, there may sit, in the same room, a telephone and a phonograph. On our bedside table stands a radio; another accompanies us in our car. These strange machines never move unless we move them; they come alive only at our touch. But give them their due: they serve us well. They provide the far-flung, trillion-nerved ganglia of commerce, of news, of our mighty military forces. And down through the days and nights of our lives, they ward off our loneliness and bring us nearer together. Perhaps someday they will make us brothers.”

“And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.”